Overview
Microsoft PowerToys is a set of utilities for power users to tune and streamline their Windows experience for greater productivity. Inspired by the Windows 95 era PowerToys project, this reboot provides power users with ways to squeeze more efficiency out of the Windows 10 shell and customize it for individual workflows. A great overview of the Windows 95 PowerToys can be found here.
PowerToys Run
https://aka.ms/powerToysPowerLauncherImageSmall PowerToys Run is a new toy in PowerToys that can help you search and launch your app instantly with a simple <kbd>Alt</kbd>+<kbd>Space</kbd> and start typing! It is open source and modular for additional plugins. Window Walker is now inside too! This PowerToy requires Windows 10 1903 (build 18362) or later.
Shortcut Guide
https://aka.ms/powerToysShortcutGuideImageSmall Windows key shortcut guide appears when a user holds the Windows key down for more than one second and shows the available shortcuts for the current state of the desktop.
Installing and running Microsoft PowerToys
Requirements
- Windows 10 1803 (build 17134) or later.
- Have .NET Core 3.1 Desktop Runtime. The installer should handle this but we want to directly make people aware.
0.18 users for updating via notifications
- We adjusted how upgrading works in 0.20. In 0.19 we accounted for this upcoming change but if you are going from 0.18 to 0.21, please directly use the installer file.
Via GitHub with EXE [Recommended]
Install from the [Microsoft PowerToys GitHub releases page][github-release-link]. Click on Assets to show the files available in the release and then click on PowerToysSetup-0.21.1-x64.exe to download the PowerToys installer.
This is our preferred method.
Via WinGet (Preview)
Download PowerToys from WinGet. To install PowerToys, run the following command from the command line / PowerShell:
WinGet install powertoys